In the last few months, the revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa seem to have transformed President Obama from a realist into an idealist. What is remarkable about this trajectory is how similar it is to that of his predecessor. When George W. Bush took office in 2001, he disdained Bill Clinton’s idealist “nation building” tendencies and in particular the idea of humanitarian intervention. But after September 11, Bush pursued his own hyper-idealist “freedom agenda”, the centrepiece of which was the Iraq war. When Obama took over in January 2009, he also repudiated the hubris of his predecessor and promised more humility in American foreign policy. During the first two years of his presidency, the United States seemed to have tilted towards realism. But just as Bush reinvented himself after 9/11, so Obama seems to have remade himself since the Arab Spring.
Archive for the 'America' Category
Obama’s idealism
Published May 22, 2011 America , international relations Leave a CommentTags: idealism, Libya, realism
Neoconservatism and the New Left
Published August 8, 2010 1968 generation , America , international relations , Israel 3 CommentsTags: 1968, Auschwitz, Iraq, Israel, Kosovo, neoconservatism
My colleague Justin Vaïsse has just published an illuminating new history (it was published in French a few years ago but just came out in English) of the American neoconservative movement , which, he argues, can be divided into three distinct phases. First, between 1967 and the mid-seventies, it was a movement of left-wing New York intellectuals who were preoccupied with domestic issues and in particular critical of liberal social policy. Second, from the mid-seventies through to the end of the eighties, it was a movement of centrist Democrat activists who opposed the isolationist turn of the party on foreign policy under McGovern and Carter but also rejected Kissinger’s policy of détente with the Soviet Union. Finally, from the mid-nineties onwards, it was a movement of right-wing Republicans who believed in a “neo-Reaganite” foreign policy and in particular in the use of American power to promote democracy in the post-Cold War world – including, of course, in Iraq.
Welcome to Detroit
Originally uploaded by Hans Kundnani.
Most Americans think you’re crazy if you tell them you are going to visit Detroit, just for the hell of it, which is what I just did. Detroit – a city that had its heyday in the 1960s at the latest – is the last place they’d actually choose to go to. Maybe it has something to do with growing up in Britain in the 1970s, but I’ve always been weirdly drawn to cities in decline like Detroit. It’s true that Detroit is almost a model of what can go wrong in cities, as described by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. But despite that, or maybe because of it, it’s still a fascinating place.
